Observations on articles I read to keep current about technology. My interests are: Privacy, security, business, the computer industry, and geeky stuff that catches my eye.

I don't think I have an agenda beyond my own amusement.

Note that I lump all my comments into a single post. This is not a typical BLOG technique, It's just an indication that I'm lazy.

Saturday, May 13, 2017

This is a big one, people.Remember, this is old software.Interesting that this appears to be an offensive weapon. I wonder if ISIS grabbed a copy?I’m going to recommend that we raise tuition
in the Computer Security program.(And I
want a raise!)

A global cyberattack leveraging hacking tools widely
believed by researchers to have been developed by the U.S. National Security
Agency hit international shipper FedEx, disrupted Britain’s health system and
infected computers in nearly 100 countries on Friday.

The ransomware encrypted data on the computers, demanding
payments of $300 to $600 to restore access. Security researchers said they observed some
victims paying via the digital currency bitcoin, though they did not know what
percent had given in to the extortionists.

Researchers with security software maker Avast said they
had observed 57,000 infections in 99
countries with Russia, Ukraine and Taiwan the top targets.

The most disruptive attacks were reported in Britain,
where hospitals and clinics were forced to turn away patients after losing
access to computers.

…The switch was
hardcoded into the malware in case the creator wanted to stop it spreading. This involved a very long nonsensical domain
name that the malware makes a request to – just as if it was looking up any
website – and if the request comes back and shows that the domain is live, the
kill switch takes effect and the malware stops spreading.

“I saw it wasn’t registered and thought, ‘I think I’ll
have that’,” he is reported as saying. The purchase cost him $10.69. Immediately, the domain name was registering
thousands of connections every second.

…This blog spells
out the steps every individual and business should take to stay protected. Additionally, we are taking the highly unusual
step of providing a security update for all customers to protect Windows
platforms that are in custom support only, including Windows XP, Windows 8, and
Windows Server 2003. Customers running
Windows 10 were not targeted by the attack today.

U.S. Intelligence Community Highlights Cyber Risks in
Worldwide Threat Assessment

…Cyber
adversaries, warns the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence
Community (PDF),
"are becoming more adept at using cyberspace to threaten our interests and
advance their own, and despite improving cyber defenses, nearly all
information, communication networks, and systems will be at risk for years."

One of the men had been arrested
12 times for violent crimes, all before turning 20. He’d also been charged with illegal gun
possession. Two others each had been
arrested eight times for violent crimes and caught three times with guns. Another man had been busted three times for
illegal guns, racked up four arrests for violent offenses and been shot twice.

Miguel Otárola reports that once the search was
narrowed, there was only one record produced by Google from the search. That’s a far, far cry from the concerns at the
time that the search would scoop up too many people’s records, but Google says
the limited outcome was precisely because they fought to limit/narrow the
search.

Neither Google nor Edina officials explained how the search was specified
or what information was turned over to police. As of Friday, no arrest had been made in the
case, Edina spokeswoman Jennifer Bennerotte said, but she declined to comment
on the investigation.

A Washington couple filed a
second lawsuit against Seattle-based Virginia Mason Medical Center, alleging
the institution failed to provide information about multiple privacy breaches
involving their medical and financial records, according to K-5
News.

…The new estimate
was provided in a filing late Thursday night in the federal court in San
Francisco, and is 1.4 million accounts higher than previously reported by federal
regulators, in what became a national scandal.

Keller Rohrback, a law firm
for the plaintiff customers, said the higher estimate reflects "public
information, negotiations, and confirmatory discovery."

…Nonetheless,
it could complicate Wells Fargo's ability to win approval for the settlement,
which has drawn opposition from some customers and lawyers who consider it too
small.

…Garrison's
firm said in a filing the accord underestimated the potential maximum damages
by at least 50 percent, and did not properly address whether Wells Fargo
committed identity theft by using customers' personal data to open accounts.

This is such a major management failure that I suspect we’ll
see it in a Dilbert cartoon. Note: This
is not just for Air Force One.All aircraft
need this procedure.Why were untrained
mechanics working on any plane?

Boeing mechanics caused $4 million in damage to Air Force
One's oxygen system

Mechanics from Boeing contaminated the oxygen system on a
presidential Air Force One aircraft last April, according to an accident
investigation board report released Tuesday.

The contamination to the VC-25A — one of two planes that
is known as Air Force One when it carries the president — required $4 million
in repairs, which Boeing paid for, the March 6 report said. Had it not been corrected, such contamination
could have increased the risk of a fire.

The report said that three Boeing mechanics at a plant in
Port San Antonio, Texas, used a contaminated regulator and contaminated tools,
parts and components while checking the oxygen system for leaks during regular
depot maintenance between April 1 and 10, 2016. They also used an unauthorized cleaning procedure
while unsuccessfully trying to sanitize the parts, the report said.

To avoid the chances of a fire breaking out, only
"oxygen-clean" tools and components — items that have been cleaned in
a specific way to remove any residue that could react when coming into contact
with oxygen — can be used on the plane's oxygen system, according to the
report.

For my student entrepreneurs: Think of this as Khan
Academy, but with stuff to sell.

A recent study challenges some of the health concerns
around cheese and dairy: Mainly that they are fatty and lead to potential heart
attacks or strokes. The researchers,
using previous studies and data found on these dairy products, found cheese
doesn’t increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. It is important to note, however, that the
study was funded in part by three dairy organizations, which obviously have a
vested interest in positive results. The
Global Dairy Platform, Dairy Research Institute and the Dairy Australia (even
though the paper says they had no role in study design or data collection and
analysis).

And red wine, in moderation, can help your heart and your
brain, according to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition. Contrary to previous findings, such as one Swedish
report from 2014, cheese, as well as other dairy products like milk and
yogurt, may not be more dangerous to your health.

Trump signs order on cybersecurity that holds agency heads
accountable for network attacks

President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order on cybersecurity that makes clear that agency
heads will be held accountable for protecting their networks, and calls on
government and industry to reduce the threat from automated attacks on the
Internet.

Picking up on themes advanced by the Obama administration,
Trump’s order also requires agency heads to use Commerce Department guidelines
to manage risk to their systems. It
commissions reports to assess the country’s ability to withstand an attack on
the electric grid and to spell out the strategic options for deterring
adversaries in cyberspace.

Via CSO – “Standards group recommends
removing periodic password change requirements – A recently released draft of
the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) digital identity
guidelines has met with approval by vendors.The
draft guidelines revise password security recommendations and altering many
of the standards and best practices security professionals use when forming
policies for their companies. The new
framework recommends, among other things:

Remove periodic password change requirements

There have been multiple studies that have shown requiring
frequent password changes to
actually be counterproductive to good password security, said
Mike Wilson, founder of PasswordPing. NIST said this guideline was suggested because
passwords should be changed when a user wants to change it or if there is
indication of breach.

Drop the algorithmic complexity song and
dance

No more arbitrary password complexity requirements needing
mixtures of upper case letters, symbols and numbers. Like frequent password changes, it’s been
shown repeatedly that these types of restrictions often result in worse
passwords, Wilson adds. NIST
said If a user wants a password that is just emojis they should be allowed.
It’s important to note the storage
requirements. Salting, hashing, MAC such
that if a password file is obtained by an adversary an offline attack is very
difficult to complete.

Require screening of new passwords against
lists of commonly used or compromised passwords

One of the best ways to ratchet up the strength of users’
passwords is to screen them against lists of dictionary passwords and known
compromised passwords, he said. NIST
adds that dictionary words, user names, repetitive or sequential patterns all
should be rejected…”

A vulnerability in Guidance
Software’s EnCase Forensic Imager forensics tool can be exploited by hackers to
take over an investigator’s computer and manipulate evidence, researchers
warned. The vendor has classified the
attack as an “edge case” and it does not plan on patching the flaw any time
soon.

Guidance Software’s forensics products are used by governments, law
enforcement agencies and private companies worldwide, including the U.S.
Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, the London
Metropolitan Police Service, Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Facebook.

The company’s EnCase Forensic Imager is a standalone tool
designed for acquiring forensic images of local drives, and for viewing and
browsing potential evidence files.

New research finds that 25% of all physical servers -- and
30% of all virtual servers -- are comatose. These are systems that have no activity in the
last six months.

…this latest
research looked at virtual servers as well, and they may represent a
significant cost to IT departments.

That's because users may be paying licensing fees on their
virtual servers, as well as on the software they support, said the researchers.

Comatose servers, both virtual and physical, may also
represent "an unappreciated security risk" because they aren't
patched and maintained, according to the research paper by Jonathan Koomey, a research fellow at
Stanford University, and Jon Taylor, a partner at the Athensis Group, a
consulting firm.

…The problem may
be one of motivation: IT managers
aren't necessarily measured on well they control costs.

Does this make local law enforcement more “Federal?” Will all states eventually have access?

Lighthouse is an Andy Rubin-backed smart security camera that
identifies people and pets

The team at Lighthouse,
a startup out of Android
co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground accelerator, doesn’t see its new
hardware product as a home security camera. Instead, they see it as an “interactive
assistant.” But Lighthouse, at least at
first, will definitely be perceived as another new entrant in the smart camera
market.

The device, unveiled for the first time today,
sits in the home just like a Nest Cam to monitor what’s going on indoors. That’s where the overlap with Nest ends,
however. Lighthouse incorporates deep learning and 3D-sensing technology to
determine who is in the home, where they are inside, and if that’s a normal
occurrence or not. The camera pairs with
a companion iOS / Android app over Wi-Fi, so users can determine remotely
whether an intruder is in their house. More
innocuously, Lighthouse can also determine whether a dog’s been walked and send
alerts when kids get home.

If you own an HP laptop or tablet you may have had every
single thing you’ve typed on it logged and stored on your hard drive. This is because, according to a report by
security researchers, a keylogger has inadvertently been installed on a number
of HP devices. And it’s still there now.

Keystroke
logging is a generally nefarious activity whereby someone monitors
everything being typed onto a keyboard. Keyloggers can be hardware- or software-based,
and are difficult to detect. Which is
why it’s so unsettling to discover that one is installed on a number of HP
devices.

HP says it has a fix for flaw that caused some PCs to log
every keystroke

…A fix for 2016
models was released today via Windows Update, while a fix for 2015 models will
be released tomorrow on both Windows Update and HP's Web site, HP Vice
President Mike Nash told Axios.

Why it matters: Although HP never
accessed the data and the logs weren't sent anywhere, just having them created
a security threat. The fix not only
deletes the key-logging code but also the files that stored keystrokes. (However, in theory customers using PC backup
software might have copies elsewhere.)

Just a thought: Will insurance companies require heart
sensors like this (and others in future) for everyone they insure?

…"Our
results show that common wearable trackers like smartwatches present a novel
opportunity to monitor, capture and prompt medical therapy for atrial
fibrillation without any active effort
from patients," said the report's senior author Gregory M.
Marcus, MD, MAS Endowed Professor of Atrial Fibrillation Research and Director
of Clinical Research for the Division of Cardiology at UCSF.

When a bartender pours too much liquor in a drink, or
someone slips away with a bottle, it can take a toll on a drinking
establishment’s bottom line. So Nectar Labs has come up with a solution: the
connected pourer and stopper.

It uses ultrasound technology and a software platform to
precisely measure how much alcohol is left in a given bottle for automating
inventory, managing shrinkage (theft or loss) and self-replenishing.

…The Distilled Spirits Council trade
group estimates that the bar business is worth $200 billion a year worldwide,
and shrinkage is as much as $50 billion a year.

…The Nectar cap
transfers data wirelessly to an app via Bluetooth. Nectar’s caps and associated platform are
designed to seamlessly fit a bar’s current operation. The pourer and stopper continuously
communicates with the app, keeping track of inventory in real time. When a bottle is finished and replaced, Nectar
automatically depletes it from inventory, and when inventory is running low,
orders can be placed directly with distributors.

From Silicon Valley to Davos, pundits have been warning
that millions of individuals will be thrown out of work by the rapid advance of
automation and artificial intelligence. As
economic forecasts go, this idea of a robot apocalypse is certainly chilling. It’s also baffling and misguided.

Baffling because it’s starkly at odds with the evidence,
and misguided because it completely misses the problem: robots aren’t
destroying enough...

Navy officials were “blindsided” on Thursday, a spokesman
told me, by President Donald Trump’s suggestion that he has convinced the Navy
to abandon a long-planned digital launching system in favor of steam on its
newest aircraft carrier.

…the newest
application of ML from Google, worldwide leaders in machine learning, isn’t to
build a new Mars rover or a chatbot that can replace your doctor. Rather, its a tool that anyone can use to
generate custom emoji stickers of themselves.

…Starting today,
when you pull up the list of stickersyou can use to respond to someone, there’s
a simple little option: “Turn a selfie into stickers.” Tap, and it prompts you to take a selfie. Then, Google’s image-recognition algorithms
analyze your face, mapping each of your features to those in a kit illustrated
by Lamar Abrams, a storyboard artist,
writer, and designer for the critically acclaimed Cartoon Network series Steven Universe.

The National
Security Agency in Washington picked up the signs. So did Emmanuel Macron’s bare-bones technology
team. And mindful of what happened in
the American presidential campaign, the team created dozens of false email
accounts, complete with phony documents, to confuse the attackers.

The Russians, for
their part, were rushed and a bit sloppy, leaving a trail of evidence that was
not enough to prove for certain they were working for the government of
President Vladimir V. Putin but which strongly suggested they were part of his
broader “information warfare” campaign.

…The phishing
mails were “high quality,” said Mr. Macron’s digital director, Mounir Mahjoubi:
They included the actual names of members of the campaign staff, and at first
glance appeared to come from them. Typical
was the very last one the campaign received, several days before the election
on Sunday, which purported to have come from Mr. Mahjoubi himself.

“It was almost
like a joke, like giving us all the finger,” Mr. Mahjoubi said in an interview
on Tuesday. The final email enjoined recipients to download several files “to protect
yourself.”

Yesterday, DataBreaches.net reported
on a misconfigured rsync backup that had been detected by Kromtech Security.
The security firm had contacted
DataBreaches.net for notification assistance on May 3 after unsuccessfully
trying to notify iHealth Innovations that patient data from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital
Center could be accessed
and downloaded without any login required.

One week later, we still do not have answers to some
pretty basic questions – like why iHealth Innovations actually needs all those
sensitive records and details, but Mary Emily O’Hara of NBC News estimates that at least
7,000 patients had their data exposed.

Last night, a spokesperson for iHealth Innovations
contacted DataBreaches.net and asked that we report the following statement:

Note that on the one hand, iHealth does not blatantly
“shoot the messenger” by claiming that Kromtech Security “hacked” them, but by
the same token, iHealth does not actually admit that they made a mistake and
left the data open to anyone who wished to download it. For its part, the hospital, which had declined
to give DataBreaches.net any kind of substantive statement, reportedly told
NBC News via email that their vendor had been “hacked:”

Something my Computer Security students need to
understand. And an illustration that you
need to be the best at everything you do.

Earlier this year, engineers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N)
who track rivals' prices online got a rude surprise: the technology they were
using to check Amazon.com several
million times a daysuddenly stopped working.

Losing access to Amazon.com
Inc's (AMZN.O)
data was no small matter. Like most big
retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on
competitors' websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing
a sale.

But a new tactic by Amazon
to block these programs - known commonly as robots or bots - thwarted the
Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer.

…Dexterity with
bots allows Amazon not only to see what its rivals are doing, but increasingly
to keep them in the dark when it undercuts them on price or is quietly charging
more.

…According
to one U.S. patent application, Amazon is working on encryption technology that
would force bots, but not humans, to solve a complicated algorithm to gain
access to its Web pages. [For full
patent record - click tmsnrt.rs/2qXbYwp]

Data Centers are expensive.Reno is giving 8-to-5 odds that it won’t be
the last expansion.

Apple announced plans Wednesday for a $1 billion expansion
of its massive data center east of Reno, doubling its investment and roughly
tripling its workforce at the technology campus where company officials expect
to hire 100 additional workers.

The announcement came as the Reno City Council approved
Apple's plans to build a $4 million shipping and receiving warehouse on a
vacant lot in downtown Reno that will make it eligible for millions of dollars
in tax breaks.

“..Although some analysts are excited about the IoT’s
potential, others have argued that it is overhyped. We take a more balanced view, based on
our extensive research as well as our direct work with IoT application
developers and their customers. Like
the optimists, we believe that the IoT could have a significant, and possibly
revolutionary, impact across society. But
we also think that the lead time to achieve these benefits, as well as the widespread
adoption of IoT applications, may take
longer than anticipated. The
uptake of IoT applications could be particularly slow in the industrial sector,
since companies are often constrained by long capital cycles, organizational
inertia, and a shortage of talented staff that can develop and deploy IoT
solutions…”

Have we become so used to technology that we don’t notice
the impact? Is checking email on a
smartphone easy compared to walking to your desktop computer and signing
on?

“Checking email outside of normal business hours does not
appear to be a burden for U.S. workers. About six in 10 workers say they check
email outside of normal business hours. Of these, few claim the amount of emails they
have to respond to during off hours is unreasonable, or that it negatively
affects their personal well-being or relationships with friends and family.” So working all
the time is the new normal.

Perception is everything.Apparently, the world does not see what he sees.

In a somewhat hard-to-believe interview with the Chicago Tribune, Lampert gave many
reasons for the company’s continued downward spiral. His claim: he is going to “...[turn] Sears
into a 21st-century merchant focused on catering to its best customers.” It remains a mystery how that will be
supported after selling off iconic brands, running the company without a
seasoned merchant at the helm, and spinning off parts of the business that
actually added value (Lands End).

On a typical day, developers ask over 8,000 questions on
Stack Overflow about programming problems they run into in their work. Which technologies are they asking about, and
how has that changed over time?

Today, we’re introducing the Stack
Overflow Trends tool to track interest in programming languages and
technologies, based on the number of Stack Overflow questions asked per month.

…Don’t see your
favorite language, technology, or framework in this post? Use the Stack
Overflow Trends tool to create your own graphs, and see what you can learn
about how the developer ecosystem is changing and where it might be going in
the future.

A technician hurriedly slings his backpack over his
shoulders, straps on his M9 pistol, and bolts out of the transport with his
squad of commandos in a hail of gunfire. As soon as his team reaches the compound, he
whips out a laptop and starts deploying a rootkit to the target server, bullets
whizzing overhead all the while.

This might sound like the action movie of a hacker's
dreams, but The Army Cyber Institute at West Point is training its
recruits to do just that. At Chicago's Thotcon hacker conference
last week, attendees got a glimpse of what its elite units might look like.

…"A lot of
it is us trying to figure out how, in a training environment, we can show
[soldiers] the effect that ... the digital domain can have on tactical
operations," Vanatta told LinuxInsider in an interview following the session.
Also present at the interview were Waage
and their colleague, Brent Chapman, cyber operations officer at the Defense Innovation Unit
Experimental, or DIUx.

…Online grocery
delivery requires dealing with irregularly shaped products with many different
form factors, multiple storage temperature regimens, short shelf lives, and
food technology constraints about what can be packed with what. Then there are the many vulnerable products
and the ways they can (negatively) interact with each other: if you load a
six-pack of beer on top of a box of strawberries, you will most likely end up
delivering a smoothie, which is probably not what the customer had in mind.

Then there’s the fact that an average online grocery order
is typically fifty items and customers are sometimes ordering more than once a
week, both of which have significant implications for how smart and
low-friction the ordering process has to enable customers to complete their
orders in just a few minutes. Most
customers don’t get up in the morning and say to themselves: “Hurray! Today is my online grocery shopping day!” Most people subliminally dream of the day
when, thanks to the power of data-fueled machine learning, the right groceries
will turn up at the right time, as if by magic, without the customer having to
do anything — a broadband of grocery.

Finally, there’s the challenge of creating a profitable
ecommerce business: you have grocery products with an average item price of
around $3 and typically 30 percent gross margin, leaving only $0.90 to pay for
all handling, selling, and delivery. Brick-and-mortar
stores are used to their customers doing this work for them; in the online
space, that is obviously not an option.

…The great thing
about having an online grocery delivery pipeline into customers’ homes is that,
once it’s in place and being used regularly, all manner of other products and
services can potentially flow up and down it. If you can do online grocery,
then you can do some other forms of online retail; but the reverse definitely
does not implicitly follow. The potential size of the worldwide online grocery
market combined with these spin-off opportunities is why grocery really is the holy grail of online retail.

Amazon enables free calls and messages on all Echo devices
with Alexa Calling

Amazon may have flopped with the Fire Phone, but don’t count it out of the telephony
game just yet. Alongside Amazon
unveiling its newest Echo device earlier today — the Echo Show with a seven-inch video screen — the company also
announced Alexa Calling, free voice
calls and messaging services that you use through all Echo devices
(not just the Show), as well as for users of the Alexa app for smartphones.

…Meanwhile, users
of that newest Echo, the Echo Show, which has the screen and video feature,
will get added services, it seems. The
one that has jumped out at me first is called “Drop In” — which lets you make a
call to someone without them even answering the phone first. Think of it as the 21st century tech
equivalent of someone coming to your house and either peeking through the front
window as they’re knocking, or maybe just walking straight in, 1970s
sitcom-style.

…Amazon
emphasizes that it is opt-in, and a way to communicate with only the very
closest members of your family.

With this, we could ‘print’ a Corvette body, aircraft
wings or one of those Batman chest armor things.

Start-up Impossible Objects on Tuesday
unveiled its Model One 3D printer, which it claims is the first such printer that can build
parts from composite materials including carbon fiber, Kevlar and fiberglass.

Thanks to add-ons and extensions, modern browsers are
capable of much more than just accessing websites. However, unless you know what you're looking
for, finding useful tools isn't necessarily easy. Instead of relying solely on its extension
marketplace, Opera hopes to claw back market share from Google Chrome by
incorporating additional features into its eponymous software. We've already seen it roll out low-power
mode and a fully-featured
VPN, but now it's making things a lot more social by integrating messaging
apps like WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram into its sidebar.

Perspective.And a
lot of that is cash.What would you buy
with $200 Billion?

The U.S. Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) said its website was disrupted by distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on Sunday night, not due to a large number of
attempts to submit comments on net neutrality.

“Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver revisited the subject
of net
neutrality on Sunday, urging people to leave comments on the FCC’s
website. Oliver
has criticized FCC Chairman Ajit Pai over the proposal
to roll back net neutrality rules, and he even set up a domain, gofccyourself.com, which redirects
users to a page on the FCC website where they can submit comments on the
proposal. The FCC’s site became
inaccessible shortly after.

…“Beginning on
Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to
multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external
actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our
commercial cloud host,” the FCC
stated.

“These actors were not attempting to file comments
themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access
and file with the FCC. While the comment
system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the
servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit
comments.” it added.

Some people are still skeptical and believe the FCC may
have mistaken the large volume of traffic for a DDoS attack. Other theories are that
someone launched a DDoS attack on the FCC just for fun, or that entities
opposing net neutrality rules launched the attacks to prevent consumers from
complaining.

The Larimer County Clerk and
Recorder’s office made sweeping changes to how it conducts business amid a Denver7
investigation, which revealed how officials had published sensitive information
belonging to thousands of people online for months.

Among the records were child
support liens, death certificates, and commercial lending filings. Many of them contained a variation of social
security numbers and dates of birth — the types of information that would be
valuable to identity thieves.

A guide to business continuity planning in the face of
natural disasters

…A recent study
conducted by a leading insurance provider found that 48 percent of all small
businesses do not have a business continuity plan. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
estimates that 40 percent of businesses do not reopen after a disaster, and
another 25 percent fail within one year. The factor underlying this failure rate is
business’ fundamental under-preparedness. Compounding the problem is the lack of
understanding of the scope and breadth of insurance coverage or government
provisions.

A whole new can of worms.Any talk about North Korea would be viewed by Kim Jong Un as hate speech.

…The case -
brought by Austria's Green party over insults to its leader - has international
ramifications as the court ruled the postings must be deleted across the
platform and not just in Austria, a point that had been left open in an initial
ruling.

…Strengthening
the earlier ruling, the Viennese appeals court ruled on Friday that Facebook
must remove the postings against Greens leader Eva Glawischnig as well as any
verbatim repostings, and said merely blocking them in Austria without deleting
them for users abroad was not sufficient.

The court added it was easy
for Facebook to automate this process. It
said, however, that Facebook could not be expected to trawl through content to
find posts that are similar, rather than identical, to ones already identified
as hate speech.

The National Constitution Center has launched a new white
paper series on a Twenty-First
Century Framework for Digital Privacy, with some very interesting papers
from none other than David Kris, Chris Slobogin, Jim Harper, and Neil Richards.
The launch
event is set for this Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. in Philadelphia, with a
keynote by Jeffrey Rosen.

An increasing number of Android applications
are attempting to track users without their knowledge, according to a new
report.

Over recent years, companies have
started hiding “beacons”, ultrasonic audio signals inaudible to humans, in
their adverts, in order to track devices and learn more about their owners.

Electronic devices equipped with
microphones can register these sounds, allowing advertisers to uncover their
location and work out what kind of ads their owners watch on TV and which other
devices they own.

Potentially, this would allow England to “watch” all 4 million
TV cameras and catch all the events requiring intervention.As automated surveillance becomes cheaper,
can automated responses be far behind?

Big Data is moving to a new stage of maturity — one that
promises even greater business impact and industry disruption over the course
of the coming decade. As Big Data
initiatives mature, organizations are now combining the agility of Big Data
processes with the scale of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to
accelerate the delivery of business value.

Venture capitalists want a piece of just about anything involving artificial intelligence,
whether it’s computers learning to drive or helping people shop for clothing. The latest to get a sizable investment is a
startup looking to use AI to improve people’s grammar.

General Catalyst, a Silicon Valley venture firm, said
Monday that it led a $110 million investment in Grammarly Inc. The San Francisco startup makes software that
underlines awkward words and phrases in the user’s writing and makes
suggestions, similar to a feature in Microsoft Word.

…6.9 million
people using the tool daily, many of whom interact with the service through a
web browser extension for Google Chrome.

Cite It In
is another in a long list of tools that are designed to help students properly
format research citations. Cite It In
provides students with templates for creating inline and bibliography citations
in APA, MLA, and Chicago style. Cite It
In works the same way regardless of the citation style that students choose.

To use Cite
It In students simply go to the site, pick a style, and fill in the
information requested in the template. Once the template is completed, students click
"generate citation" and a citation is created for them to copy and
paste into their documents.

“The Center for Open Science (COS) is pleased to announce
that it has added another branded service to its open source preprints service,
OSF
Preprints. The new service, called LawArXiv, provides free, open access, open source archives for legal research. LawArXiv is an open access legal repository
supported and maintained by members of the scholarly legal community. The repository was developed by three
non-profit membership organizations and an academic lead institution:

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.